During the last four decades women’s and gender history have become vibrant fields including studies of attitudes regarding the limited physical and other abilities of females as well as studies of the accomplishments of notable female athletes. We have become increasingly aware that women have made contributions to physical education, dance and sport that go far beyond being teachers, athletes and coaches. They have created and implemented an astonishing variety of programs intended to serve the needs of large numbers of children and youth sometimes organizing student health services, as well as chairing departments of physical education. They have worked as directors of sport, physical education and dance, running playgrounds and recreational facilities and have created and/or served as important officers of a variety of sporting organizations. This book explores the contributions and achievements of women in a variety of historical and geographical contexts which, not surprisingly opens opportunities for additions, revisions and counter-narratives to accepted histories of physical education and sport science. It seeks to broaden our understandings about the backgrounds, motivations and achievements of dedicated women working to improve health and bodily practices in a variety of different arenas and for often different purposes. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Sport and the Emancipation of European Women: the Struggle for Self-fulfilment explores the contributions of European women to the emancipation of women worldwide. It expands understanding of the need for their attitudes and actions and celebrates their achievements in freeing the female body from unwarranted political, cultural and social restraint in the courageous pursuit of the Enlightenment 's ' secular value system: ‘the unity of mankind and basic personal freedoms and {a} world of tolerance, knowledge, education and opportunity' (from Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, 2004). The Collection records the pulling down of European barriers via sport to women’s realisation of ability and release of talent and their conquest of crushing inhibitions, inexcusable irrationality, intolerable prejudice and denial of opportunity : no barriers came down without confrontation. The struggle to overthrow prejudice set for the first time in the context of recent European history and the recent evolution of European sport, is described in this pioneering Collection. It is the first publication to focus specifically on European women and their struggle for emancipation via sport. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Ancient Greece was the model that guided the emergence of many facets of the modern sports movement, including most notably the Olympics. Yet the process whereby aspects of the ancient world were appropriated and manipulated by sport authorities of nation-states, athletic organizations and their leaders as well as by sports enthusiasts is only very partially understood. This volume takes modern Greece as a case-study and explores, in depth, issues related to the reception and use of classical antiquity in modern sport, spectacle and bodily culture. For citizens of the Greek nation-state, classical antiquity is not merely a vague "legacy" but the cornerstone of their national identity. In the field of sport and bodily culture, since the 1830s there had been persistent attempts to establish firm and direct links between ancient Greek athletics and modern sport through the incorporation of sport in school curricula, the emergence of national sport historiographies as well as the initiatives to revive (in the 19th century) or appropriate (in the 20th) the modern Olympics. Based on fieldwork and unpublished material sources, this book dissects the use and abuse of classical antiquity and sport in constructing national, gender and class identities, and illuminate aspects of the complex modern perceptions of classicism, sport and the body. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Sport studies and sports history have witnessed a recent substantial increase in publications. However, the relationship between literature and sport has been little explored. Sport, Literature, Society looks at a wide variety of case studies ranging from Japan to England, from India to Australia and covers sports as diverse as cycling, football, wrestling and boxing. It concentrates on historical perspectives. The contributors are all academics of international reputation and include historians of sport and literary scholars. Literature may shape our perceptions and reactions to sport as much as sport may inform our reading. As mimetic practice, as aesthetic object, as imaginative release, sport is analogous to literature and the other arts; at the same time, it can become the subject of literary, visual or musical elaborations. Literature often conceptualises the place and role of sport in culture and society. Indeed, sport inhabits literature in ways that have not been adequately studied. Sport studies have investigated the relationships between sport and society, education, gender, nation, and class. To look again at these relationships through the prism of literature enables us to change our focus and to assess the centrality of sport in culture. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.